Bellenger, who is the first female president in the Society's 116-year history, is an ASHRAE-certified Building Energy Modeling Professional and High Performance Building Design Professional. Her presidential theme is “Modeling a Sustainable World.”

Bellenger believes that in energy simulation, daylight analysis, computational fluid dynamics, and building information modeling, we have powerful tools that enable us to create and refine our vision of a building — its appearance, systems, operation, and performance. Those resources, used effectively in an integrated design process for new buildings and in analyzing retrofit opportunities in existing buildings, will help us model a sustainable world.

“Our biggest challenge is implementing integrated design in daily practice,” Bellenger said. “The traditional approach where the architect designs the building shape, orientation, and envelope and then transmits the drawings to the mechanical and electrical engineers for their design is a silo approach that misses the rich opportunities for optimizing building performance through a collaborative approach from the beginning. It is going to require a real cultural shift in our industry to transform the design process, and it's a shift that has to occur if we are going to reach our goal of net-zero-energy buildings.”